From (b) it equally follows that no officer of the society is in future responsible to it for any misdeed whatever, since such misdeed cannot well be among his official duties.
Perhaps it is not very surprising that the result of the Judicial Committee, which had been gathered to its task from the ends of the earth, was received with disgust by the generality of members then met in London for one of their interminable conventions. A demand was even heard for a private jury of honour; or, failing that, for publication of the case for both sides, the course to which one side, as we saw, had affected to pledge itself. Mr. Judge found himself unable to refuse his assent to the jury proposal. Again Mrs. Besant dashed in and triumphed in the sacred cause of obscurantism. At the third session of the convention she announced that she and Mr. Judge had agreed upon a couple of statements representing their different points of view, and proposed that the convention should hear these, accept them, and let the matter drop. These two statements compose the second part of the pamphlet; and they are at least as bewildering as the first.
“We come to you, our brothers, to tell you what is in our hearts,” Mrs. Besant read out. Her endeavour to “tell” fills four pages. The following are the sentences which gyrate least round the point:—
I do not charge, and have not charged, Mr. Judge with forgery in the ordinary sense of the term, but with giving a misleading form to messages received psychically from the Master in various ways.... Personally I hold that this method is illegitimate.... I believe that Mr. Judge wrote with his own hand, consciously or automatically I do not know, in the script adopted as that of the Master, messages which he received from the Master, or from chelas; and I know that in my own case I believed that the messages he gave me in the well-known script were messages directly precipitated or directly written by the Master. When I publicly said that I had received, after H. P. Blavatsky’s death, letters in the writing that H. P. Blavatsky had been accused of forging, I referred to letters given to me by Mr. Judge, and as they were in the well-known script I never dreamt of challenging their source. I know now that they were not written or precipitated by the Master, and that they were done by Mr. Judge; but I also believe that the gist of these messages was psychically received, and that Mr. Judge’s error lay in giving them to me in a script written by himself and not saying so.... Having been myself mistaken, I in turn misled the public.
The rest of Mrs. Besant’s statement is easily summarised. Part is devoted to minimising the importance of the question whether Mr. Judge wrote, or the Mahatma precipitated, the letters, by remarking that after all it did not matter so very much, as Mahatmas sometimes communicate (like spiritualist “controls”) by allowing ordinary people to write for them. “It is important,” quoth Mrs. Besant, naïvely, “that the small part generally played by Masters in these phenomena should be understood”—a remark with which the present writer quite agrees, and a main object of the present narrative. But in the sense in which Mrs. Besant meant it, it was not very relevant to an inquiry entirely dealing with letters passed off as having been precipitated, and precipitated without Mr. Judge’s knowledge, by the Mahatma himself.
Beyond this, Mrs. Besant’s statement consists about equally of blame directed at the untheosophical “vindictiveness” of Mr. Judge’s accusers in pressing an inquiry “painful” to Mr. Judge, and of laudatory tributes to the character and Theosophical activity of Mr. Judge himself.
Down Mrs. Besant sat, and up rose Mr. Judge, and read his statement. It contained the following sentences:—
I repeat my denial of the said rumoured charges of forging the said names and handwritings of the Mahatmas, or of misusing the same.... I admit that I have received and delivered messages from the Mahatmas ... they were obtained through me, but as to how they were obtained or produced I cannot state.... My own methods may disagree from the views of others.... I willingly say that which I never denied, that I am a human being, full of error, liable to mistake, not infallible, but just the same as any other human being like to myself, or of the class of human beings to which I belong. And I freely, fully, and sincerely forgive anyone who may be thought to have injured or tried to injure me.
Now, so far as these sentences were an answer at all to such charges as Mrs. Besant’s statement had allowed itself to convey, they were certainly a flat contradiction. But that point was naturally overlooked by eyes moist from the affecting “forgiveness” of Mr. Judge’s peroration, and his very handsome, if somewhat tautologously expressed, admission that he was only a “human being.” Without a word more, nemine contradicente, it was